Archive for May, 2012

We put down some white onions from bulb tonight as well as some sweet potatoes. I know you can get sweet potatoes fairly cheap at the store, but I really want to taste an organic grown sweet potato from my garden.

Bed #2

Along with the onions and potatoes, I picked up a Mortgage Lifter tomato from C&C gardens in Hernando, a Park’s Whopper tomato, and a German Johnson Tomato, and about 16 pepper plants from Home Depot. Some of the peppers don’t look so hot, but everything else is looking good so I transplanted them into the bed. We also planted some ‘pizza peppers’ from seed in this bed – we’ll see how they do but I don’t have any expectations.

M, A, and E helped me this evening get our first crops in. We planted our first 4×4 section of bed #1 with sparkler radishes, green onions, and carrots. A good watering and this bed is off to the races!! I can’t wait to see what it is going to do this year.

It’s sad but I’m getting the garden started late this year. I intended to get it started earlier but some weather delays coupled with some availability of digging equipment pushed it back to mid/late may.

Our first year
…of gardening was 2010. My mom came down from Branson and helped us build a 4’x16′ raised bed cinder block garden. She heard about a gardening technique that a man named Len Pense from the Springfield Missouri area. I purchased his downloadable manual which covered a lot of what you need to know to make these raised beds work so.. we built one bed. I learned several things my first year:

#1 – Indeterminate tomatoes grow big – HUGE – in these beds. I put two plants at one end of what I’ll call Bed #1 and they took off. I made the mistake of planting two tomatoes together and buying the ‘big size’ tomato cages made of concrete reinforcement wire. These cages are about 1.5′ in diameter and 5′ tall – great for most gardens – not for this one. By the end of the growing season, both tomato plants were overflowing out the top and fell over.

#2 – I hate squash bugs. I first saw the squash bugs and thought – eh.. no big deal – gardens are supposed to have bugs right? No dummy – gardens are supposed to have worms. The only reason most bugs show up is for dinner. Thinking that gardens were supposed to have bugs, I paid these cute little white creatures no mind. My yellow squash were the first plants to start to die followed by my beloved Zucchini. I though.. what on earth would cause these plants to just die – was I not watering them enough? Watering too much? No.. these white critters were now brown and there were even more little white critters … they were having dinner on my plants!! Into the garbage heap and out to the street they went.

I learned several other lessons but those were the big ones.. oh.. and building raised bed cinder block gardens was challenging at best – especially when you have to dig out a hill to make it level.

Our second year…started out pretty good. I took some of the lessons I learned and tried to apply them: